You can be so penurious and parsimonious,
so selfish and greedy, such an avatar of avarice
that a trio of ghosts must haunt you
to get you to behave like a basic human being.

Today, that's the norm, what our culture celebrates.
And the Ebenezers can feel warm about themselves once a year,
while watching theater or the BBC, never making the connection, never leaving a good tip, never giving the homeless a buck, never paying an employee "more than what the market will bear."

The bespectacled elite gathered in the glassy box
of modern architecture, prattling politely about the
poet’s new novel, analyzing psychoanalysts and
parsing the layers of rhetoric that shaped the modern age.

The high-speed spreading at high school debates
served as a high-minded metaphor of linguistic legerdemain,
contained a critique of the vacuity of the era’s political speech.
Outside, a panhandler begged for bites of a breakfast sandwich.

Something's rotten in Denmark,
maybe something awash on the beach
in a country where you're never
more than 52 kilometers from the ocean.

Møns Klint stands a spectacular natural wonder
overlooking the endless expanse of the Baltic Sea,
an imposing facade of white chalky cliffs
towering over the vast teal expanse of water.

There's 120 meters
and then there's 120 meters
to the horizonless sea below.

The glaciers of geological prehistory
gave us a stunning sweep, as breathtaking
a seaside vista as you will ever see.

The wind knows
the rustle of the oak boughs,
the susurrus of the prairie grass,
the fragrance of the wildflowers,
the stillness at the edge of the lagoon.

The wind knows
the trilling of the warblers flitting through the tallgrass,
this flat and endless expanse of verdant, sun-bathed flora,
this kingdom of wide-open spaces, the big empty,
these geographies that define us, within and without.

Sorry father,
we failed you.
You failed us.
We failed.
We all failed and not better.
Our woebegone ways
failed everyone around us.

In the bloom of youth, we were all awkward and weird
and contrived in our own inexplicable and ineluctable ways.

We were all sunglassed fictions, heroes in our own heads
and less than that in the slow gnaw and chomp of reality.

We might croon, leather-jacketed, about the dawn before a disinterested audience of wights, hollow-eyed and resigned.

We might jam on a Casio keyboard atop a file cabinet
and hope, idly, someone, someday, might eventually get it.

Cardboard boxes proliferate
all across the empty room
awash with acid sunlight.

Every ending is a new
beginning, every conclusion
a fresh start, a blank slate.

All that serrated packing tape
signifies something more than back
strain and a change of address form.